


the sun is but a morning star

by purrfectj



Series: resign yourself to the influence of the earth [5]
Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game), Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Genre: Egg Festival: Year One, F/M, Friendship, Strawberries, Thunderstorms, gloaming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-19
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-06-03 04:05:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6595924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purrfectj/pseuds/purrfectj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Farmer Tess strolls down her romantic memory lane and attends her first Egg Festival in Stardew Valley. She must have strawberries. Alex is too much and Doctor Harvey not quite enough. Emily is a good friend.</p>
<p>This is part 5 of a many-part series exploring Stardew Valley, its inhabitants, and its newest addition, a female farmer named Tess. It's written in present tense and is rooted in my love for the farm where I grew up and my lifelong love affair with Henry David Thoreau's Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sun is but a morning star

Tess takes Amy Poehler’s advice to heart: she has a dance party nearly every day. Her copy of _Yes, Please_ (and, let’s be real, of _Bossypants)_ is so dog-eared that she can recite portions of it by heart but she doesn’t because, well, who else is there to listen but the parsnips and she might have a dance party of one but she keeps it confined to the cabin, the floorboards newly shiny and slick under her bare feet as she flashdances her way ‘round and ‘round and ‘round again, dreamy ballads and aching blues and hard-driving rock and bubblegum pop. She is mouthing the lyrics into her hammer, pausing at the floor-length mirror opposite her bed in a hip-shot stance, the leather toolbelt that is already stained with sweat and dirt and some little bit of blood slung low on her womanly hips, and she pauses to stare at herself, sable brown hair and whiskey brown eyes and golden skin, freckles and muscles and the hint of roses in her cheeks. 

There are some words for which Tess has no frame of reference in regards to herself, no anchor in the sea of her own insecurities, and beautiful is the one with the most deadly deep barbs. She has never been thin, will never be thin because even with the endless manual labor and steady diet of healthy, nutritionally dense food, there is still a softness to her lower belly, still a roundness to her cheeks, still the little girl inside who ate because it was there and she was bored and who had no one to tell her about eating her feelings. Normally this is where she would leave herself, spiraling down, down, down into depression staring in the mirror and listing her faults. Except, as she traces a path with her eyes over curves and dips and hollows, new and precious and unexpected, she somehow thinks of the handful of lovers she entertained in the city with a sort of knowing, winsome grace, a half-smile curling the Cupid’s-bow of her lips: 

Callum with his swept-back, surfer-cut blonde hair, changeable hazel eyes, and the scar on his lip that saved him from perfection. Well, physical perfection, because his personality was akin to a dick. He liked to take her to trendy restaurants and bars to show her off while, in private, he bitched about her thunder thighs and her ice cream obsession and the pair of Snoopy pajamas she wore at least once a week, soft and pillowy and completely asexual. He was even bad in bed, sloppy and quick and not in the fun, sexy, wreck me sort of way. 

She threw out the pajamas, sadly, before she threw out the man. 

Bray with his shaggy mane of dark curls, his soulful brown eyes, and his wide, wide mouth that was beautiful, especially when he pouted. He liked to write bad poetry and worse songs and he had a terrible relationship with his parents that should have clued her in that, perhaps, he was a bad bet in the romance department but he knew how to use that mouth and his long-fingered hands and so she kept him for longer than was wise. Or, more accurately, he kept her and she didn’t think, hey, how can you afford all these fancy dinners and fancy chocolates and fancy shoes until the FBI was at her door asking her some very uncomfortable and pointed questions. 

She kept most of the shoes but tossed the letter he sent her from prison. 

Rex with his manicured fingernails and bright red hair and slim tailored suits, his unbearable smirk and incredible need for tenderness. Tess lets herself sigh, just a little, as she turns away from the mirror to finish dressing and start her day. That one, well, that one had been entirely her fault and it shames her even now to remember his startled blue eyes as she screamed at him to pack his shit and get out. She still has no idea what possessed her, what empty, hollow place inside of her made her hell-bent on ruining a good thing with a good man whose only crime, looking back, was his inescapable, borderline compulsive, need for order. Okay, so she rarely put the cap back on the toothpaste and she never put away the laundry and she left a pile of shoes at the door a foot (ha ha) high, and he was probably right that a disordered space was a sign of a disordered mind but something in her balked at his insistence she be someone she wasn’t. 

She didn’t attend the wedding though he sent her an invitation with his personal regards for her happiness. She did send them a gift, a frivolous, pretty sculpture of her family’s that Rex had coveted. The thank you card was, shockingly, signed by them both, and she thinks of it now as she lets the music play on, her callused fingers catching on the strands as she braids her hair. 

It is Egg Festival Day so Tess takes a little more care with her appearance, the braid then twined around like a coronet, her usual jeans traded for caramel-colored slacks that fit loosely enough that she has to use one of her few belts, a melon-colored cardigan with faux-pearl buttons over a pale butter-yellow tank edged in lace, and she clasps a thin braided gold chain around her neck after using her mascara wand before declaring herself as ready as she can ever be to face the whole of Pelican Town and much of Stardew Valley. Tissues, lip gloss, and her wallet are tucked into her rucksack, the rucksack along only because Marnie let it slip that if she ever wanted to plant strawberries, a favorite of half the town and of Tess herself, she will have to buy the seeds at the Festival. 

Ripe, plump, red berries dance in her head and tease her tongue with remembered sweetness as Tess bikes into town, the chocolate-brown flats she chose rather than her sturdy work boots or her tennis shoes cumbersome for pedaling, the gusty wind that smells of the threat of a coming storm most likely making a mess of her careful hairstyle, and she nearly turns right back around when she reaches the edge of town and sees that, indeed, all of the people she has met and a few she hasn’t are gathered in the town square, talking and laughing. Nerves churn uncomfortably in her gut, nerves and the fluttery edge of panic, and it is only because Alex happens to look up at just that moment that she even gets off her bike, his often amused-at-her-expense expression daring her to recklessness. 

“You’re staring,” she chides him boldly after locking her bike to its normal rack in front of Pierre’s and relishes the hectic flush that rushes across his high cheekbones, the little moue he makes with his mouth that is an affectation because, of all of the things Alex is not, he is most certainly vain. Of course someone who spends most of his days in some sort of athletic endeavor and reaps the rewards of bulging biceps and washboard abs to go with the perfectly straight, even white teeth and carelessly wind-tossed golden brown hair and slightly crooked nose, well, perhaps they deserve to wallow in their own beauty. Tess knows she certainly appreciates the way he fills out the old green and yellow letterman’s jacket, artfully faded in all the right spots, hanging open over the henleys he seems to own in every color under the sun, blueberry blue today which makes his already startling blue eyes somehow even more uncomfortably rich but not direct, oh, no, Alex is a master at the art of flirtation as he lowers his lashes and gives her a look that causes her insides to squirm like the worms she’s been using to bait her fishing hooks. 

He saunters closer, all power and grace, and flicks a finger down the bridge of the nose her Grandfather told her she got from a faery, so small and sharp. “Hard not to stare, new girl,” he says and Tess wonders when it got so damn hot outside suddenly, she’s burning up, and she almost opens her mouth and says something bold and exciting and most likely incredibly inappropriate and awkward when Haley appears suddenly at Alex’s side, sliding her prettily manicured hand with proprietary grace into the bend of his elbow and pouting up at him with her ridiculously full mouth. 

Tess she ignores which, really, that’s actually pretty sweet because Tess has absolutely nothing to say to Haley, Haley of the tousled blonde hair and pansy blue eyes and fluttering false eyelashes, Haley who is wearing a feminine spring frock and impractical heels that, Tess notes with catty satisfaction, have mud on them. Behind Haley, though, is her sister Emily who Tess does like and understand, Emily who is wearing a casual poppy red shirtwaist dress with chunky wedges and a big grin, her shockingly blue hair parted on the side and messy in a way Tess suspects is due more to the aforementioned wind than careful styling. Emily bops up, nudges Tess with her hip, makes a silly face at Alex and Haley, and exclaims, “Farmer Tess! Come to hunt eggs with us town folk?” 

“No,” Tess admits honestly but she softens the denial with a smile and a return nudge to Emily, gesturing up toward the booth where she can see Pierre holding court and happily counting money from a battered tin box. “I need strawberries.” 

Emily takes her around, introduces her to a handful of people she hasn’t met, shares a plate of tea cakes while everyone else slightly young rushes off to find the fabled eggs, rolls her eyes and whispers that Abigail _always_ wins because she cheats, and looks startled when Dr. Harvey wanders up and asks to sit. “It smells like rain,” is his conversational salvo and Emily looks bored already but Tess smiles at him, bright and welcoming, and nods. 

“I love that smell, ozone and water, and if you look over there,” Tess turns and points out to the west, her hand brushing his cheek for which she does not apologize because she only half-realizes she’s done it, whiskers and skin and warmth against the callused pads of her skin, “You can see the line of the storm, headed this way.” She sighs, content, and lets her hand sink to her lap. “Tomorrow will be a good day for my crops.” 

Harvey offers her a lift home when she realizes she can’t haul the strawberry plants on her bike or in her rucksack without crushing them, huffing a little as he drops the tailgate of his ubiquitous truck and tries to lift her bike up and in. They talk about the stars on the way back to the farm, Tess mapping the few constellations she knows with her fingertips on the windshield, and his smile is a wide flash of self-deprecating humor under his mustache when she hops out and leaves him with the strawberries and gets out her bike herself. He’s careful with the seedlings, setting them on the porch gently, and she is suddenly seized with the memory of his hands on her skin as he stitched her closed. 

“I’ll bring you some of the first harvest.” At his long, measured look, she babbles on, her skin prickling as if lightning has struck nearby, static electricity, static cling, zip, zap, hair on end as she babbles on, “In payment.” 

There, in the gloaming, twilight painting his skin in the silver of the moon and the black of the encroaching night, Harvey shakes his head at her, slowly, and looks briefly disappointed. “Sleep well, Tess,” he says, not at all what she thinks he was going to say. 

The rain chases him down the drive, his taillights twinkling scarlet as the thunder rolls in off the mountain, a dull roar. 


End file.
